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I have a 8 GiB USB stick that I put Windows on some time ago. I made the bootable USB in Ubuntu by some CLI commands which copied the Windows ISO file on it and made it bootable.

Now I want to use that USB for other things, so I want to format it with ext4.

I used GParted and also CLI commands to do it, but none of the options worked. Every program tells me in the end that the operation was successful. I unplug the drive and plug it back in and it is still the same bootable USB stick that it was before.

Here is a video I made where I show how I delete the partition it has on GParted and how after the operation the old partition is Video 1 shared through Dropbox.

Edit: new video showing with another program: Video 2 shared through Dropbox

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  • try Magic Parted bootable CD, it has never failed me... even tough it uses Gparted. It performed well, even in times when Gparted Live CD, or Gparted as part of Linux Distro didn't work... I'm messing winth OS a lot, so I have to format my thumb drive pretty often. I have ran to simillar issues several times...
    – RiddleMeThis
    Jun 12, 2015 at 18:50
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    Also I unmount my thumb drive every time before formatting... didn't see you do that...
    – RiddleMeThis
    Jun 12, 2015 at 18:53
  • I did in the gparted video. Forgot to show it in the other one. But belive me I have done it. Testing it with every program I can find right now.
    – inimene
    Jun 12, 2015 at 19:00
  • It's blind shot, but try to unmout that device as root in terminal and after that, perform changes with fdisk (which you probably tried already), it worked in one particular case...
    – RiddleMeThis
    Jun 12, 2015 at 19:08
  • Also after some googling apacer.com/en/support/downloads/Repair_v2.10.1.1.zip ... is reported to work in some desperate cases .... it runs trough Wine
    – RiddleMeThis
    Jun 12, 2015 at 19:22

1 Answer 1

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I've seen this happen when the thumb drive had gone into read-only mode due to a damaged partition table. Recreating the partition table and committing those changes before attempting other operations should fix you up.

If that fails, it's likely your flash drive is damaged in some way that has rendered it permanently read-only, and with the current price of 8 GB thumb drives, it may make the most sense to simply buy another one.

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  • Seems to not work even like that. It will do the operations and then the same disk with same partition table is there. I remember that I had to change some inode stuff or something like that via CLI when making that bootable USB. Also when formating it with a certain command, it will tell me that inode is wrong for that USB. Could it be something to do with that?
    – inimene
    Jun 12, 2015 at 19:00
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    Making a new partition table should ignore everything on the flash storage, including any old partition tables. If that hasn't worked, it's possible your thumb drive is damaged. Given the price of 8 GB thumb drives these days, it's tempting to suggest it's not worth wasting time on.
    – Zeiss Ikon
    Jun 12, 2015 at 19:23

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